JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – MTN South Africa has announced it has achieved the fastest indoor mobile data service in South Africa using long term evolution (LTE)-Advanced technology.

The service is able to provide customers with data speeds up to an 1 Gbps, said to be the first Gigabit per second speed ever recorded in South Africa using a mobile broadband connection.

MTN’s LTE-Advanced solution uses Huawei’s latest small cell Lampsite product, which aggregates two unlicensed LTE 5GHz carriers (40MHz) with one licensed LTE 2100MHz carrier (15MHz), and combines this with next generation MIMO and modulation schemes. LTE-Unlicensed technology operates in the 5GHz unlicensed band, and is ideal for in-building deployments due to its higher capacity.

The success of this LTE-Advanced deployment is seen as a giant leap forward for mobile broadband technology in South Africa, and demonstrates the potential that mobile broadband technologies can achieve if additional spectrum is allocated to mobile network operators.

MTN Acting Chief Technology Officer, Krishna Chetty, said MTN had been upgrading base stations and its fibre-optic transmission network in preparation for this launch.

“It’s great to claim another South African first for MTN with the trial towards building a 4.5G network. It is even more pleasing that we’ve done this ahead of many other advanced economies around the world.”